Today, the KDE team invites interested testers and reviewers to give KDE 4.2.0-Beta1 a go. The release announcement lists some significant improvements. The purpose of this release is to get feedback from the community, preferably in the form of bugreports on the new bugs.kde.org bugtracker.
Beta1 offers critical features like the Eyes applet (an XEyes clone), but also a more streamlined user experience all over the workspace and applications.
With the KDE team being in bug fixing frenzy after the recent hard feature freeze, now is the time to help us smoothing the release for your pleasure starting in January.

Comments

I kinda agree with you... I do think KDE should make this transition as time goes by, from systemtray "icons" to plasmoids and notification... Amarok, for instance, would be great with that...

but there are some problems regarding killing the systemtray:

The problem is what if someone use a non-kde app that works with the freedesktop systemtray specs and doesn't use kde notification system?
For instance, I use aMule (I haven't found a qt/KDE version of it yet ... :( ). There are a lot of gtk apps that do so... and unfortunetly they are not legacy apps, just apps from another DE.

From a user perspective, there are many many linux users that don't know the difference of Gnome and KDE, (for them.. they are just apps on the screen), so for them, a systemtray is just a systemtray.

The main problem here is in the freedesktop's systemtray specs. I am amazed how kde developers got a solution that works with this old specifications and even brings something new (plasmoids inside the systemtray).

Unfortunately, our dream of killing the systemtray will have to be postponed... it depends on another spec that KDE people can not change...

"The problem is what if someone use a non-kde app that works with the freedesktop systemtray specs and doesn't use kde notification system?"

Um, I did mention that scenario in my post.... there would be legacy-support for non-KDE-apps, but KDE-apps would use new technology. But right now both KDE and non-KDE-apps use systra, and the end-result is a systray that is brimming with icons.

I am missing this feature, too. I would find it really cute if I could select "open with DragonPlayer" or something in the device notifier. Opening in dolphin is pretty useless for DVDs for most cases.

ah, looks very promising, as always. i'm using kde4 since their first beta-releases for 4.0. granted, it was a "rocky road" in the beginning, but now on 4.1.3, everything is just working and i don't miss a thing. kde4 ist the first kde i did not customize.

plasmoids are great, especially folderviews, work is being done on the nvidia-drivers (thank god!). now where i really would like to see some progress is the new "raptor-menu". the first concepts looked promising...

Thanks to the KDE devs for their efforts. I'm using KDE 4.1.3 now but I'm still missing the "file size view" in Konqueror 3.5. Konqueror 4 and Dolphin appears to not have it. Is it planned to be back soon in Dolphin or dropped definitely?

Bug 151669, sounds almost like a song. This is a 1 year old bug. 4.0 was released with it, 4.1 and now we are at 4.2 Beta 1 and it's still there. Will 4.2 be released with this bug? Is it so difficult to fix?
Well I don't know because I can't code and I appreciate the programmers' work and effort a lot.
I don't want to sound like a whiner because I hate complaining but this bug is really annoying and one of the few glitches in KDE 4 that causes me to still install KDE 3.5x even though I only use bits and pieces of it.

Anyway I would still like to say a big thanks to the KDE team for it's great effort as usual.

i am using kdemod 4.1.3 and i have this function, maybe it is an improvement from the kdemod packaging team. But there is another possibility: open your konsole, type sudo systemsettings et voila there you are. You can change everything in administrator mode.

Thanks for the tip, I will try it. I guess you are using KUbuntu so maybe it's a distro modification since it still exist as a bug. OpenSuse hasn't made this modification as yet so I will try the console trick ;)

That's true. I notice that they are using a really high panel that's mostly common in KDE until now. Remember how people complained about the KDE panel being too high. Well somehow MS likes it and has copied it, one of the main changes in Windows 7.
Do you know what will happen at the end of the day? People will still be saying that KDE copied it from MS.

i don't really care who copied what because xerox made the first GUI anyway. it's just that in windows this gradient thing on panel looks good, but in kde it feels out of place because that kind of gradient isn't used anywhere else in kde. even the plasma widgets look different

I think this new panel theme is out of place with the rest of the oxygen theme. On KDE 4.1, I think the only thing in common with windows vista theme was the color of the panel (black), nothing more. There was a white line with gradient on the top of the panel that matched with the rest of the plasmoids theme. It didn't look like vista at all (although some people think that vista is the only OS that can use black.. everything that's black is a "copy" of vista for those people.. :) ).

Now the panel background is really looking like vista in appearance(IMHO)... with that gradient... even more when you use dark wallpapers.

I do like oxygen theme, so what I am doing now is using the 4.1 panel background theme with the 4.2 oxygen theme. This can be done with "Desktop Theme Details" on System Settings.

Count all the bugs I encountered after using it for only 30 seconds (from svn, clean ~/.kde4):

1. I wanted to resize the panel -> background goes gray. Only fix is to log out
2. I wanted to start systemsettings using krunner. It didn't work as expected. No completion.
3. Add widgets dialog has white fonts on white background
4. Adding widgets to the panel - plasma didn't let me add that analog clock to the left side of the panel (it reserved the space for it on the right, see the picture). It worked after three attempts.

As a professionnal user I fully agree with you : KDE4 = Katastrophic Disturbing Experience.
Just a minor exemple : Dolphin don't even know to properly count its files ... and a major one : Klipper likes to silentiously drop its last content in the file you are writing (try to update a website with Quanta under Kde4...: most of the scripts will become broken and hard to clean.)
Score more stop-overs in Shop... from Ark to Kttsd nothing is yet usable for production...(dont answer me to post bugs : it seems useless...)

Like I said elsewhere: KDE4 is 10 months old. After 10 months, OS X was still a disaster. after 10 months, KDE2 still had issues. And now you guys are complaining about a BETA-release. After 10 months, GNOME2 was still unusable. And Vista is still crap ;).

Unfortunately, people still do not see the huge step KDE is taking in such a short period of time. Plasma, for instance, is less than one year old, and is already doing great things. It is not perfect yet, of course... but I can imagine many amazing things plasma (and other new KDE technologies) will be doing in a not so far future (3, 4 years).

quite a good bugreport, with screenshot and all that. but could you post this on bugs.kde.org? most revelopers wont read all comments on this newsentry. And probably you will have to help a little with how to reproduce, because i can't reproduce any of those bugs. But perhaps they have been fixed after beta1 has been tagged. there was alot of bugfixing just after the tagging

I used trunk from yesterday to test so it's still not fixed. I can reproduce it always with clean configuration. Tested on a laptop (intel graphics and driver). I won't report bugs to the bugzilla as these are obvious, other bugs which I reported/voted for are still open (after many months), and my suggestions are ignored. So bugzilla is, for now, of no use, at least for me.

it might be that your distro's default set up scripts are messing things up. using a clean .kde4 with svn in intrepid would do all sorts of bizarre things that should not have been happening (and didn't with another distro). I can't say for sure it is intrepid's fault as I only tried another distro, or that this is even the same problem...but it is worth bearing in mind if you can't get others to reproduce this bug

1. True. Should be reported, I will check the b.k.o if it is reported or not.
2. True. Autocompletion didn't work when trying to run the systemsettings for the first time.
3. Could not reproduce.
4. Could not reproduce.

2. Second time works because it has systemsettings in history. It doesn't execute it like it should, like kate for example.
3. I don't know. That dialog doesn't use KDE color settings, it takes that info from somewhere else.
4. Adding plasmoids to panel is buggy, it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

I've got another one:
after a plasma crash, and they happen often with 4.2 (in current version, I know it is a beta!), the plasma configuration icon that normally is on the right side of panel goes to left, same for the one in desktop!
The problem is that it occupies more than half of the k-menu, then you must click on the little space left to use it.
Locking plasmoids hide this icon, so you can use k-menu, but still a ugly bug.

To be honest, more and more I'm looking and testing another window managers and DEs. KDE4 apps in general are really nice (I love dolphin and krdc!), but the desktop (hello plasma!) is fat, full of bugs yet, and not worth the trouble if you just do not use plasmoids and like nice desktop effects.

And nowadays, using KDE3 is not a option anymore, since distros are dropping it :-(

That is not critic. We are trying to consolidate the plasma effects first and then we'll bring our attention to such secondary things for a file manager such as moving/copying files around. Expect that and similar bugs fix in 4.4 or 4.5.

Same here, i dont have this problem. I can move folders in any crazy way i would like to and also i gwenview and dolphin. I am using kdemod 4.1.3 and not KDE 4.2. But your bug seems to be related to the version 4.1.3. Sorry, dont understand your concern.

Looking at the bugreport, it seems like a bug that is hard to reproduce, but people seem to be actively discussing it and looking for a fix. So people are working on it, what more do you want? Do you think that developers should stop everything else, and focus on individual bugs only?

KDE 4.2 isn't released yet (eg this is the first beta) so how can you know you'll jump into a bug within 3 minutes? Sure, you can do that in 4.0 and 4.1 but then again, those are meant for the adventurous users, not ppl looking for super-stable anyway. And we've been clear about that.

Hi I am using KDE 4.1.3 now and I really like it. I'm looking forward to 4.2. However I have some questions.
1. What's the state of raptor?
2. What's the state with strigi integration? In 4.1.x it just doesn't work.
3. What's up with kget? It is unusable buggy (tried 4.1.3 gentoo and 4.1.3 kubuntu)
4. In 4.1.x are dozens of layout problems. (kmail config too large, wasted space in Konqueror menu/toolbar, similar problem in kopete, the display system setting module, just to name a few). Has been work done to address these problems?

dunno about raptor.
strigi got a bit better, I believe. I don't use it, but KRunner does show all kinds of results when I search so apparently it works ;-)
KGet was hopeless for a while, it's slowly getting better. Not there yet.
Layout stuff has been steadily improving, but I don't think it'll be perfect in 4.2